“I don’t have any childhood memories of vinyl. I think my parents just used the record player and the CD player interchangeably and it was on a very high shelf so I couldn’t tell and didn’t really care. My house was just always full of music, coming from the speakers or my dad’s piano/ guitar/ mouth. All music all the time.”
“My first real interaction with vinyl was on a trip to NYC my freshman year of college. It was my first trip without my parents and it was to lay down a track with a producer who had been pursuing me. That sentence sounds so flashy and cool but it was actually not a good situation at all. That dude turned out to be very aggressive and inappropriate and it was a bit of a nightmare that landed me and the friend who came with me in a basement with 2 car engines, a rocking horse, a bunch of open cans of paint, and thousands of cardboard boxes.
We slept on a velvet couch next to a coffee table full of drugs after talking our way out of sleeping on the couch next to his bed… it was… whatever…that’s not the point. The only shining moment of that experience was listening to Abbey Road on vinyl in that basement. I grew up with The Beatles. The all-music-all-the-time was like 73% Beatles. I sat on that couch and thought about home, and my parents. They would have freaked OUT if they knew the situation I was in.
Somehow though, my risk-adverse panicky teenage brain was at ease. I was just sitting there listening to the music. Abbey Road is meant for vinyl. No automated pauses between tracks, just straight through to “The End” … and then “Her Majesty.” I had never really thought about it, but hearing that warm tone and gentle grit in that dire circumstance felt like the exact right way to listen. It felt like 1969.
8 years later and I still think about that night any time I put a needle on a record. Maybe it’s like how people can remember the first time they got drunk or high or had sex. I’ll always remember the first time I really heard vinyl.”
—Julia Nunes
Enter to win our signed copy of Julia Nunes’ Some Feelings by citing in the comments below a record that got you through a proverbial rough patch. We’ll choose one self reliant winner with a North American mailing address a week from today, January 27, 2016.
